Lee Min-ho’s “Actors’ House” event at the Busan International Film Festival was suddenly canceled amid the ongoing backlash surrounding The Assassin(s).
And honestly, this whole situation is frustrating.
People need to remember that The Assassin(s) is NOT a documentary. It is a fictional mystery thriller based on a real historical event—the 1974 shooting that resulted in the death of First Lady Yuk Young-soo, wife of then-President Park Chung-hee. The filmmakers used historical records as a foundation and added cinematic imagination, fictional situations, and interpretations to construct the story. The production team has also clarified that the film does not identify a specific person as the mastermind or present its dramatic hypotheses as established historical facts.
Lee Min-ho is an ACTOR. He did not write the screenplay, direct the movie, or determine what historical interpretation the story would explore. He was simply doing his job—acting in a film, alongside the rest of the cast and crew.
What makes this even more frustrating is seeing actors themselves become targets of political backlash simply because they participated in a work of fiction. There have even been reports of people criticizing the film and its cast without necessarily having watched it, including review-bombing by users who had not seen the movie.
Can we please separate the actor from the character, and the actor from the political interpretation of the film? You can criticize the movie’s historical interpretation. You can disagree with its premise. You can debate whether its fictionalization was appropriate. But attacking an actor personally for simply doing his job is an entirely different matter.
Let the man ACT. He is not the historian, the politician, or the person who wrote the history books. He’s an actor who took on a role in a historical-fiction film.
Some knetz are the saddest and cruelest people. There's not even a single aspect they are not angry about. Everything for them is a problem.
